MU Podcast 061- Dark Times on the Road to Leng

[fallingtower]

The Lord made a deal with some Viking Deep Ones to attack the gathering with the understanding that they kill all the unruly men, with the breeding age women as payment.

I like the general idea, but... the Laird deliberately sells his own family line to the Deep Ones (and essentially to extinction)? That's taking things one step further than even Capn Marsh did. Cold.

I'd have to double-check, but would you have a lord with authority over multiple clans in that era? My (vague) understanding is that clans had their own chief, and chiefs in that era basically reported to the local king. If that turns out to be right, it'd make for an even more selfish Laird.

There was more to the story actually. The Lord in question was the son, his father recently dying and he being the new hope. Coming back from the Holy Land with gifts and promise of a new peace and prosperity. In reality he was up to no good.

And yes the clan chiefs did have to report to the king. The old king was ineffectual and weak.

And again yes, the EEEVIL Lord agreed to mix his bloodline with the Deep One Vikings. Not extinction...immortality. The king would take the Deep One head fish's daughter for a bride.

[sirlarkins]

Oh dear, RPG magic is a topic I could perseverate infinitely about. I'll stop there!

Never!

Seriously, though--I just stumbled across Enlightened Magic on the Chaosium site and wondered if anyone knew anything about it? Somehow it slipped under my radar. Did it just come out? It looks like it still uses spell lists and what-not, but it seems to be a more historical/tradition-grounded magic system that might port over nicely into a CDA campaign as a non-Mythos magic alternative.

Also, Dr. Gerard, if you haven't checked out GURPS Cabal, you should, just for the fun of the read. It's truly a wonder to see how Ken Hite systematized Hermetic magic traditions into an RPG format. From his designer's notes:

It has always amused me that there are whole rafts of modifiers and special cases and calculations and so forth in GURPS for shooting a gun, which is in actuality one of the simplest things in the world -- but that casting a spell in the basic GURPS magic system is three dice and a cloud of dust. Wham, bam, fireball, ma'am. Nothing like any system of magic ever practiced in the Real World, certainly. The Western "Hermetic" magic tradition (the one the Cabal, as practitioners of "Egyptian wisdom" would use) is delightfully lush and maniacally complex, rich with flavors and nuances stemming from Babylonian religious iconography, Renaissance paint chemistry, and probably serious neurological disorder.

[Dr. Gerard]

Oh man, that's a great blurb. I'm not a total curmudgeon when I have to use spell lists, I just like exploring alternatives. They work fine in CoC, but I'm glad to see some room for improvisation, corruption and disaster in 7E. I love the historical approach for sure. The search for a true philosophers stone recipe, or one of its weird components, would make a great hook.

[Shimmin Beg]

There was more to the story actually. The Lord in question was the son, his father recently dying and he being the new hope. Coming back from the Holy Land with gifts and promise of a new peace and prosperity. In reality he was up to no good.

And yes the clan chiefs did have to report to the king. The old king was ineffectual and weak.

And again yes, the EEEVIL Lord agreed to mix his bloodline with the Deep One Vikings. Not extinction...immortality. The king would take the Deep One head fish's daughter for a bride.

That's some nice villaining right there.

[Shimmin Beg]

MUP Intro in Manx, from Shimmin Beg

Ooh, fame! I'm just listening to this one now, so some quick answers to the Manx conversation.

Not such a bad guess on the Scandanavian, actually. Manx was somewhat influenced by spending quite a long time owned by the Norse Kings of Mann and the (Scottish) Isles and the island had a significant Norse population influx. My name may be one result (Sigmund > Shimmin).

There's a bit of argument over whether the language ever counted as dead, but it does actually have native speakers. Basically, there was a one-generation gap where it was passed to adult learners rather than learned natively by children. Those adults have been busily bringing up Manx-speaking kids, and there's now a Manx-only primary school for them, though the older ones have to do high school in English.

The stones are written in Ogham script, which indeed looks like gribbly beasties have been raking at stones. It's pretty cool. Surely Dr Gerard can find a use for it.

[Dr. Gerard]

Ah, I thought I detected some Old Norse sounds there. Glad to hear of its revival.

What kind of Manx-speaking population would have been around in the first century of the second millenium?

[Shimmin Beg]

Until about 1000AD, basically everything from Ireland to the Gaelic bits of Scotland was just a continuum of Middle Irish dialect, although Scotland was probably diverging a fair bit. A couple of centuries later, the Scottish and Manx dialects were drifting well away from Irish, with some influence from Norse and from northern British languages (Pictish and Cumbric, a bit like Welsh). A century or two after that, Manx was diverging substantially from Scottish Gaelic. A lot of it was English influence, especially later on - words got borrowed and grammar shifted. There also wasn't a literary tradition to stabilise the language, it was essentially oral.

So... basically they'd have been speaking Middle Irish, but with Norse nobility and probably a fair bit of bilingualism. Manx as such didn't exist at the time, but the island dialect would have been pretty distinctive, as tends to happen with isolated populations. In fact, Manx English was pretty distinctive until a century or so ago, apparently.

[Shimmin Beg]

Sorry to keep hogging the board, but look what YSDC just put up! A 1922 guide to the Isle of Man!

Looks like the stars are coming right...

EDIT: As Jon has correctly pointed out to me, this is only available to Patrons, I'm afraid.

[gmbaal]

One of the things I like about the setting is the fact that people are so superstitious and have such large fears about things they do not understand in the world as it is. I feel that this is a great bit of groundwork for a CoC setting to build from. I have ran a few games set in the Dark Ages. One game called Divine Justice where the PCs are being sent by the church to find a priest that has strayed from his path after his work on translating this book called the al-Azif to Latin. The other one was dealing with cultists in Gaul that have been travelling to this very strange tree for ages, but it started off with a missing person investigation.

I have heard a lot of good things about it. The setting/supplement about the Vikings sounded very interesting. I may have to do something with that. I'm a big fan of Norse Mythology and with Vikings being such a big series by the History Channel there is a lot to pull from right now.

Joe

[WiseWolf]

I have always wanted to run something during the Crusades. Regarding the disconfort that Chad mentioned inherent to the age, I'd say it is easy to handle as long as you provide more heroic characters with common enemy or in search of the "holy grail" or a clash with druids.

Has anyone read this crusaders brp from Chaosium? Crusaders of the Amber Coast

Thanks for another great episode.

PS: Dan, I sent you an email.